Android

The latest figures for platform share of the various versions of the Android OS, tabulated on the Android Developers Dashboards, show that Android 5.0 Lollipop is finally starting to pare off its slice of the overall pie, with 3.3 percent of devices accessing the Google Play Store during the seven-day period ending March 2nd, 2015, running Google's latest Android OS iteration. Android 4.4 KitKat, meanwhile, the immediately prior version, is present on almost 41 percent of all such devices.
This does mean, though, that more devices are still running Android 4.0.3-4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich, at almost 6 percent, and Android 2.3.3-2.3.7 Gingerbread,...

Forget Fifty Shades of Grey - how about Fifty Flavors of Lloyd? Yes, if you want to see a dominant force cracking its whip over the supine global smartphone market, Android in IDC's latest Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker is the one you want to catch. According to the IDC numbers, "Android and iOS inched closer to total domination of the worldwide smartphone market in both the fourth quarter (4Q14) and the calendar year 2014 (CY14)." And in particular, while iOS saw its market share fall slightly from 15.1 percent in 2013 to 14.8 percent in 2014, Android grew its market...

Audible has a great selection of audiobook downloads, and reasonable prices—especially if you buy during one of their frequent sales, using the discount offer for buying them together with certain Kindle e-books, or using one of their monthly credits. But since Audible’s books contain DRM, in some respect they are only as good as their player—which, sadly, is not all that great. I’ve been listening to a lot of audiobooks lately. It’s something I can do during the parts of my day job that don’t require a lot of brainpower, and it’s fun to hear a good book reading....

Interactive book apps may not yet have set the world on fire, but there is at least one place for them—as an adjunct to video games. On January 28, 2015, Industrial Toys LLC released Midnight Rises, an interactive graphic novel application for iOS. The e-comic serves as a prelude to Midnight Star, a mobile shooter game which Industrial Toys LLC released for iOS today. (Both applications are expected to come to Android “sometime soon.”)
Midnight Rises was written by John Scalzi, with art by Mike Choi and music by Serj Tankian. The first chapter is free; the next two are 99...

The latest Android Developers Dashboard numbers for the week ending February 2nd show the Android OS version 5.0 Lollipop, the latest and greatest, getting only the most tentative tonguing by users, at just 1.6 percent of the Android user base. At this rate, it could take a long while for the new OS iteration to … ahem … stick.
The previous version, 4.4 KitKat, meanwhile, is still forging ahead, at just under 40 percent of all Android OS users accessing the Google Play Store. Ice Cream Sandwich is at 6.4 percent, Gingerbread at 7.4 percent, Froyo at a measly 0.4 percent,...

The OnePlus initiative, "a technology startup committed to bringing the best possible technology to users around the world," which sought to create cheap yet fully featured Android smartphones for global markets, ran into trouble recently over licensing disputes in India with CyanogenMod, the Android OS mod of choice for many smartphone cognoscenti and its preferred software so far. Now, OnePlus has apparently decided that the solution is its own fork of the Android OS, dubbed OxygenOS.
The OnePlus statement on the issue reads:
As many of you know, we will be launching our own ROM in the near future. We’ve spent a lot...

According to a recent report by Strategy Analytics, shipments of smartphones running the Android OS reached 1 billion for the first time in 2014, when "global smartphone shipments grew 30 percent annually to reach a record 1.3 billion units."The report continues: "Android has become the first ever smartphone operating system to ship more than 1 billion units in a single year. Android accounted for a huge 81 percent share of all smartphones shipped globally in 2014, and Apple iOS remains its only serious threat for now."
This rather puts a dent in recent laudatory reports of Apple's sales numbers, claiming that Google...

As many of you will remember, after my article "Android latest: Lollipop does not suck" brought reams of comment (67 posts in all) primarily to the effect that in their experience Android 5.0 Lollipop did suck, especially in the context of a mandatory upgrade, we called a poll to systematize the feedback. The results of the SurveyMonkey poll, with 32 responses in since December 6th, and most (some 70 percent) upgrading Nexus 7 devices (2012 or 2013 versions) are as follows.
Asked how their experience of Android 5.0 Lollipop had been, almost 20 percent said "Very Good," and a further almost...

Can a company give Amazon a run in 2015 when it comes to ebooks?
Maybe, but the company with the best footing is Apple. Anecdotally, several authors have mentioned the successes they have had through Apple’s iBooks. This is a good new for authors who are looking for other avenues to sell their books. But keeping iBooks strictly for Apple products may not do it.
iBooks has been around since 2010 when it was launched with the iPad. In 2013, iBooks became an integrated app on iOS 8. Since that time, iBooks seems to be taking more of the market share.
In October,...

A German startup that had announced new Android devices has just shut up shop - before even opening. Linshof, the German company in question, states on its own website that:
Linshof is closed. We understood that it would be a difficult project and we are grateful for having the opportunity to work on it. Unfortunately, our investors decided to close the project due to their own internal reasons. Thank you all for your wonderful support.
Note: We have never accepted any kind of pre-orders, donations, or third party investments. All our liabilities and obligations were paid in full.
Previously, Linshof announced a smartphone, the i8, with...

Google might have taken a critical step towards closing the proverbial time and cost gap between app development for its platform and for the Apple App Store, with the release of Android Studio 1.0, a stable Integrated Development Environment (IDE) available for free download for Windows, Mac, and Linux. One of the attractions for the developer community is supposed to be that this IDE is built on the IntelliJ IDEA, and "in a report by Infoworld in 2010, IntelliJ received the highest test center score out of the 4 Top Java Programming Tools." In any case, Android developers now have a...

In the wake of all the issues reported over Android devices upgraded to Android 5.0 Lollipop, Google has released a helper app designed to provide "tips and proactive troubleshooting to help you get the most out of your device." Google Device Assist runs on "US-based Nexus, Google Play edition and Android One devices running Android 5.0, Lollipop," which of course, at this stage of the upgrade cycle, are the majority of devices affected....